Music

Oct 14, 2011, 11:11AM

Quasi-Talented and Over-Hyped

Trashing the latest in blog-anointed hype nuggets: a simple Friday pleasure. I really wanted to nuke the new Youth Lagoon record, The Year of
Hibernation, for a lot of reasons: the bad name, all the nauseating
buzzwords in the press release (nostalgia, analogue aesthetic, VHS tapes,
childhood, BARF), and a sneaking suspicion that this guy, 22-year-old Trevor
Powers of Boise, ID, is only the latest in a line of naïve one-trick-ponies who
in 10 years will be working at the same pizza arcades so mythologized in their
music. It’s not that simple, though: Powers and his music as Youth Lagoon is
not wholesale bad—he’s certainly more interesting than Memory Tapes, a fitting
analogue (har har… whatever happened to that guy anyway?). Even though this
record isn’t one long facepalm, there are bad habits and worn tricks that run
throughout.

Such as the vocals. The
vocals where you can’t understand a goddamn thing Powers is saying because his
voice is ensconced in a fuzzy gold coat of reverb, and enunciation is
non-existent (aka Panda Bear Syndrome).
Songs like “Afternoon,” “Bobby,” “Posters,” and “July” have a handful of
interesting keyboard lines and vocal melodies, but this stuff just feels
photocopied, beyond the grain of the lo-fi-as-statement-but-really-we’re-just-lazy-and-willfully-ignorant
sound. The factory preset backbeats and its woefully rote tone and mood aren’t
appealing at all, they’re just unsophisticated. Powers wears his influences
(2008, basically) on his sleeve, but is not willing or able to perform beyond
simple (in the worst way), amateurish songwriting. He’s 22, but Avey Tare wrote
“Penny Dreadfuls” at 16. Somehow I doubt he’ll make the next Person Pitch, and no one will if the
primary mode continues to be pale imitation.

It's like, dude: you sound like a million Bandcamp bedroom noodlers. Get
a gimmick or something to make it interesting (top hats and vibrato?). Bands
like this are the Silverchair/Stone Temple Pilots/Bush/Better Than Ezra of our
time: too in awe or intimidated by the titans of their day to move beyond an
already established sound. And I mean, if something is gonna carry records like
this, it’s the tone, the production quality, whatever things people can latch
onto after 10 seconds of listening. It’s not going to be the songs: cheap
YouTube soul that’s not fooling anyone. This ended up being harsher than I
expected. I enjoyed The Year of
Hibernation, but in the same way I enjoyed the McFlurry I finished for
breakfast this morning. I’ll stick to a steak dinner, whenever that may come
along.